No End in Sight

Charles Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, makes his documentary filmmaking debut with a damning history of the Iraq war's mismanagement. The movie is oddly framed, opening with a primer on U.S.-Iraq relations that its art-house audience probably won't need and its right-wing critics will easily dismiss (it revisits the 1991 Persian Gulf war in some detail, then leapfrogs over President Clinton's bombing of Baghdad). But Ferguson is admirably tenacious in assigning blame for the boneheaded mistakes that have doomed Iraqi reconstruction. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is hung out to dry, and ping-ponging interviews show the CPA's Paul Hughes and Walt Slocombe shamefully passing the buck back and forth over who disbanded the Iraqi army. In English and subtitled Arabic. 102 min.
ByJ.R. Jones